Design and teamwork: a contested alliance

Design research is concerned with the development, articulation and communication of design knowledge; and one aspect of this is the investigation of the relationship between products and the way in which people design them.
This study was prompted by my response to a paper by Gabriela Goldschmidt's (1995) where she concluded that 'there are almost no differences between the individual and the team in the way they bring their work to fruition.' In order to ascertain the validity of her claim, I carried out a survey among design students and designers from various disciplines in order to investigate both the activities and, more especially, the perceptions of the importance of the individual's influence on the design team.
I was interested to find that Goldschmidt's claim did correspond neither to the subjective experience of those participants who teach on design programmes, nor to the views of those who study on design programmes. However, during the course of my research the initial focus on quantitative data gradually shifted to an enquiry into how people learn to design, the nature of group dynamics and creativity, the development of (design) abilities in individuals and teams, and the production of design as a social process. The study concludes by considering how might development be systematically nurtured in design education.